Monthly Archives: September 2015

The talk is partially a re-hash of a talk I did back in 2011 on iPhone Games Programming, and it’s partially a re-focusing of a talk I did last year on Generic Game Model (my small collection of Objective-C classes for game development).

Tonight, a chess variant is sitting at the top of r/gaming. That itself is probably newsworthy, but watch the video below of Speed Chess (apparently unveiled at the Tokyo Game Show 2015) to see why I’m now dying to play this real-time chess played on a touchscreen.

And while I’m at it, I’ve been eagerly anticipating Chesh for at least a couple of weeks now. I’ve been waiting to say anything about it here until I played it, but the since I wanted to post the Speed Chess video above, I felt it deserved inclusion in this post. Here’s the trailer:

From what I’ve gleaned from the internet, it’s a random chess variant with hundreds of possible pieces. I like the glitch-tank aesthetic. Remains to be seen whether I’ll also like the randomized gameplay.

My good friend Nate was kind enough to playtest 3 out of four of the pyramid games I posted yesterday (we didn’t play the party game), and the results shouldn’t be terribly surprising, but they were generally disastrous. In short, none are ready for prime time. (But on the upside, none were complete throw-aways either, and all have potential!) Here are my notes:

Action / Movement Programming — This suffered from the problem where the player has the advantage, so nobody wants to make themselves the second-to-last player. This meant there was little incentive to try and make the target shape. We did play with a pretty cool variant / modification where there are 9 “goal cards” (in a 3×3 grid), and any 4 cards in that group can be the goal. The rule about “modifying” the programmed cards was very confusing to Nate, and I had to clarify / re-explain it several times. There was also confusion about being able to modify pieces on the gameboard, and I think adding an action that would allow you to modify (swap?) existing pieces would probably help. None of this fixes the disincentivization to make the goal shapes. We talked about maybe not replacing the cards. Also, I just had the idea to maybe only take one of the cards instead of all of them, so most of the shape would still be there, but it would obviously need modifying. Maybe then you also get points at the end of the game for collecting “sets” of a single color card. We also played on a very large gameboard (not quite a full chess board, but it was with the triangular chess boards that are sometimes used for looney Pyramids), and I think we could have just played on a 4×4 grid, and it would have been a tighter and better game.

Action Point Allowance System — This game suffered from the rules allowing you to totally screw yourself. If you didn’t play a combination of either 1) two 2-pip pieces or 2) a 1-pip and a 3-pip, you were giving yourself a serious disadvantage later in the game. I think the rules should just specify you can play one of those combinations. Also, the player who played first had a huge advantage, not because they played first, but because as the rules are written, they also got to play last. I think making both players play only a 2-pip on their first turn might mitigate that problem. Another issue was that we played on a 3×3 grid, but never really used more than 4 towers. Another rule change I’m considering is to make the players fill the grid first, before playing higher levels on any tower… or possibly just to play on a 2×2 grid. (Or both.)

Area Control / Area Influence — Finally, as I’d hoped, this game seemingly has a lot of potential, but we ended up not playing it while we spent like 20 minutes discussing how the captures could work. (Rules as written do not specify capture rules, and I thought I’d just make something up quick about surrounding groups, and we’d see how it plays, but turns out there are too many different possibilities!) It would take me a long while to write all the things down that we discussed, but briefly, we talked about: Switching it to allow ONLY swaps of cards with pieces on them (then you could capture from a swap or a placement). Allowing piece movement to capture, with cards containing pieces of the opposite color “frozen” in their place, essentially “locking” neutral spaces on the gameboard as kind of a suicide move. Finally, if we allow swapping cards with pieces on them (which I think is a good idea), I think maybe it should only be allowed if they have the same (or possibly only if the opponent’s card has lesser) pip counts. Maybe that parenthetical should always be true, which would mean you could only move cards that have pieces on them, since by default all the cards start empty.

I don’t know when I’m going to get around to revising the rules as written, but hopefully in the not-too-distant future!

At least partially inspired by another BGG user’s lofty goal of 1 new pyramid game a month, around January 1st I had the even-more-ridiculously insane idea to make a goal of designing a new pyramid game for each game mechanic on Board Game Geek. There are 51 unique game mechanics on BGG, so that’s LESS than one a week. Totally do-able, right?!

Of course, I promptly forgot all about that idea, until I stumbled onto the first couple in my design notes earlier today. I spent some time subsequently flushing them out and writing a couple more, and so without further ado, here is a link to the in-progress results: pyramid games for every BGG mechanic.

So far (as of this blog post) there are only 4 rule-sets in a “completed” state. I have notes for two others, but they haven’t been written up yet, which means they may not even be playable. At least one of those not yet present require a custom game board (the one for Roll-and-Move).

This idea came, originally, hot on the heels of a renewed interest in pyramid games because I’d helped conceive and design these pyramid cards, a set of playing cards for icehouse/looney pyramids. (The card artwork, — ie, bulk of the work — was done by my sometimes collaborator August Brown.) At the time, I’d thought up a few different game ideas, but it turned out that none of them were really all that fun to play. A statement that may of course also be true about the ones in the link above. YMMV. Two of the designs listed below (and flushed out in the link above) use the cards. I think the ideas in the doc are better than the original pyramid card ideas, but they are still as-yet untested. Anyway, here are some brief summaries:

Acting mechanic — In this game, players take turns choosing a board game, and without revealing that game’s name, set up and play that game with looney pyramids. They cannot talk, and the other players must try and guess which game they are playing. Subsequent players cannot choose the a game that has been previously selected.

Action / Movement Programming mechanic — This game is a combination of seeing patterns in pyramids and using your hand to manipulate pieces on the gameboard. Game play happens in rounds where a “goal pattern” is decided, and players then simultaneously try and choose actions that will manipulate the board to create the “goal pattern” there.

Action Point Allowance System mechanic — This abstract strategy game is played with 4 action points per turn. (With the first player only allowed 2 points.) Some suitable small grid is chosen for the playing field, and each player takes a “stash” of icehouse pyramids and takes turns playing pieces onto the gameboard. At the end of the game, the board is scored and players win based on number of pips that are visible in their color.

Area Control / Area Influence mechanic — This 2-player go-like game is played on a board created with pyramid cards. Cards make up the gameboard, and pieces are placed to “secure” the territory. This is the game I’m most excited about / interested in playtesting.

Why working 5 or 6 hours in the AM is WAY less productive (for me) than working 7 or 8 hours throughout the day

First of all, I sort of wondered if this would happen. I’m not a morning person. I’ve never been a morning person. I used to tell people I worked with that I couldn’t manage to get anything done before 10 AM, not because I wasn’t awake, but because I couldn’t convince my brain that I was awake. It took an hour to get into the groove, maybe.

But just now I came up with a new theory.

In the past, I’ve had days where my morning is productive, but also days where my morning is unproductive. Possibly in disproportionate amounts, but let’s assume for a minute they are in equal frequency. On the days where my morning was unproductive, I am often aware of this, and compensate by trying to work extra hard (or be extra focused) in the afternoon.

Additionally, I am a lunch guy. I never eat breakfast. This is relevant because, probably due to blood sugar (or something else, who knows), if I don’t eat, and I’m really hungry, I notice my productivity really drop. (Hey, it JUST occurred to me that my lack of eating breakfast might have something to do with my lack of productivity in the AM. I never claimed to be smart.) Anyway, lunch is the most important meal of the day for me, if I don’t eat lunch, I often end up scratching my head at 2 pm, wondering what I’ve done with the last two hours.

So now, if I find that I’ve had a non-productive morning, I push myself hard to get more done… often “working” through lunch, (or through when I should be eating lunch), and then realizing that I haven’t been productive even while trying to be extra productive.

The new difference, and the productivity KILLER here, is that now I am done working around 2:15. So if I didn’t have a productive morning, even if I do eat lunch, I’ve only got like another hour or so of work remaining to try and be extra productive. I can remember days in the last couple of weeks where I’ve had exactly this revelation, and it’s been pretty demotivating.

Perhaps this is just the latest in a long line of thoughts justifying my lack of productivity. In short, writing this post: was it procrastination? Or productive?

I have too many projects going right now. I wrote up these descriptions earlier, so I decided to post them. These are roughly in order of priority. (Although the last three are essentially just “on the backburner” for now.)

1) I want to get an update to Root Down pushed out that adds an AI player, as well as universal support. The AI isn’t good in any sense of the word, but it’s good enough to surprise me when I’m not looking too hard. I’m not sure if I’ll try and improve it, or if (more likely) I’ll just release it as is to move on to the next thing. (The universal support is about 80% there, and I should have that submitted sometime tomorrow or early next week.)

2) Last year I did some preliminary work and got my very first game (Go-Tetris) playable on iOS. It’ll be called ActionGo. Since the new AppleTV announcements yesterday, I now hope I can push this out sometime in the near future, with AppleTV support.

3) Similar to Root Down, I’ve had an update to ActionChess in progress for several years. Not taking the time to do it right means that I’ve got to untangle a large pile of spaghetti code to get it done, but the update will add 1) Universal support, 2) One or two minor added game modes, 3) A major new game mode that is more of a “static puzzle” game. I’m calling it puzzle mode, and may also release it as a stand-alone app.

4) I’ve got another action puzzle game in the works that is currently without a title. This is not a board game mashup, but does mash another game genre into the mix. I have an artist (possibly two) I’m collaborating with there.

5) I’m rather slowly trying to learn Unity. I have a project I’m going to make in it, since I agreed to work on a touchscreen version of Entrapment, (the great abstract strategy game by Rich Gowell). So far, I’m a bit hung up on some of the Unity best practices, but I can’t wait to make some progress when I can focus on it.

6) Finally, I have a series of playground games I’m working on. Don’t want to go into too many details, but essentially it’s a playground video game.

Hopefully I can bang out some of these app updates in the next couple of weeks, and focus on ActionGo until the new Apple TV comes out. I’m also experimenting with some cross-platform frameworks. I’ve played a bit with OpenFrameworks, and have also spent some time looking into OpenFL (HAXE). In theory either would allow me to publish games for iOS & Android at least, and whatever other platforms they support.